Apollo's Pickleball Verdict: Why the $225M Check Is a Real-Estate-and-Media Bet, Not a Sports Wager
A few days before the Strait of Hormuz reopened and the oil curve collapsed, Apollo Global Management quietly closed the largest structured check ever written into the business of pickleball. The trade press treated it as a curiosity. The composition of the deal, the rolled-up assets, and the implied valuation say something different. American private equity has decided that pickleball is a real-estate-and-media platform with a sports IP wrapper, and that it is mispriced.
The transaction: Apollo Sports Capital, Apollo’s newly created sports investment platform, led a $225 million structured investment into Pickleball Inc., the merged parent of Major League Pickleball and the Carvana PPA Tour. Tom Dundon’s family office co-led. The round values the company at roughly $750 million and brings total committed capital to $315 million. Dundon and the Pardoe family, who built the two tours, retain majority control. Crucially, Pickleball Inc. is simultaneously rolling in Dundon’s adjacent pickleball assets — Pickleball Central (the largest equipment retailer), PickleballTournaments.com (the software powering thousands of amateur events), Just Courts (court installation), and a minority stake in DUPR (the dominant rating system). Combined, those verticals generated over $140 million in revenue in 2025.
That last detail is the one to underline. Pickleball Inc. is not a professional sports league with a side hustle. It is a vertically integrated consumer platform that happens to own a professional league.
Connor Pardoe, the PPA Tour founder who now sits as Pickleball Inc.’s chief executive, framed the strategic logic the morning of the announcement.
“This is a seismic day for the rapidly growing business of pickleball at all levels. This investment allows us to fully integrate the sport into one cohesive ecosystem — uniting professional pickleball, consumer goods, technology, and media under a single, unified platform.”
The vocabulary — cohesive ecosystem, unified platform — is not the language of a sports league owner. It is the language of a roll-up. Apollo, on the other side of the table, said as much through Al Tylis, the chief executive of Apollo Sports Capital.
“Pickleball is one of the fastest growing sports in the world, appealing to players and fans of all ages, and we are excited to be making this structured investment.”
The word that matters in Tylis’s sentence is “structured.” Apollo did not buy a controlling stake. The firm wrote a minority growth check with downside protection — the kind of paper Apollo’s credit arm has been writing all year into infrastructure-style consumer platforms. Dakota, which tracks sports IP deal flow, called the transaction “the year’s most-discussed sports IP transaction” and noted that it positioned Pickleball Inc. at a Series C-equivalent valuation, “ranking it 5.4x against the $42m Series C median across 886 venture and growth equity rounds in the trailing year.” That is a growth-stage valuation, not a sports-franchise valuation. The disconnect is the trade.
The participation curve
The investment thesis sits on top of a participation curve that has rarely been seen in modern American sport. According to the 2026 Sports & Fitness Industry Association annual report, pickleball reached approximately 24 million U.S. players in 2025, growing more than 170 percent over three years and ranking as the fourth-most-played sport in the country. It has been America’s fastest-growing sport for five consecutive years. Samin Odhwani, Major League Pickleball’s commissioner, captured the institutional read on the same release.
“The continued and dynamic year-over-year growth data has proven without a doubt that pickleball is no longer an emerging sport, and is instead quickly becoming the next tier one sport in America. This capital raise will allow us to expand our focus into new and scalable opportunities like content, media, and the development of infrastructure to support our fast growing events.”
“Tier one sport” is institutional language. It is the phrase a commissioner uses when the goal is to be priced like the NHL or MLS by a sell-side desk inside the next 36 months, not like a regional softball league.
The numbers that matter
Pull apart the disclosed financials and the deal economics tighten considerably. The combined MLP and PPA Tour generated $30 million in combined sponsorship revenue and $60 million in top-line revenue in 2025, with projections of $74 million in 2026 — a 23 percent year-over-year acceleration at the professional layer alone. Add the consumer goods, retail, software, and court-installation businesses and the parent company prints $140 million on a 2025 base. At a $750 million enterprise value, that is roughly 5.4 times last year’s combined revenue — a multiple that looks demanding next to legacy sports franchises but inexpensive next to consumer-platform precedent. Topgolf, before its 2020 sale to Callaway, traded at similar multiples on a smaller, slower-growth revenue base. Liberty Media has paid materially more, on a relative basis, for Formula One commercial rights.
The franchise-valuation prints inside the merged group are doing the talking. The LA Mad Drops sold a majority stake at a $13 million enterprise value in 2025, an all-time MLP record. The expansion Palm Beach Royals franchise was placed at $16 million. Both numbers were unthinkable when the original MLP-PPA merger closed in February 2024. They suggest that institutional ownership groups — not just enthusiast billionaires — have begun underwriting these teams at consumer-platform comparables.
The real estate quietly underneath
The least-discussed leg of the thesis is the property story. The Picklr, an indoor franchise chain rolled into the Apollo deal, has expanded past 500 locations worldwide, much of that growth funded by converting dead retail real estate — vacant big-box stores, idle warehouses, and shuttered fitness clubs — into indoor pickleball clubs. That is a commercial real-estate play with a leisure asset on top of it, and it is exactly the kind of converted-footprint roll-up that Apollo’s real estate arm has been incubating in adjacent categories. It is plausible that the “sports” label on this investment is, for Apollo’s underwriting committee, a label of convenience.
That framing also explains the international expansion. Inside three weeks of the close, PPA Tour announced a seven-tournament Spanish circuit launching September 2026 in Barcelona, joining PPA Asia, PPA Australia, PPA Canada, and PPA Italy. Each international tour is a license-and-franchise vehicle with a small operating footprint, exportable to any market with disposable income and underutilized indoor space. FILA signed on as Local Platinum Partner for the Ho Chi Minh City and Kuala Lumpur events in May. The professional-tour infrastructure is doing double duty as a route-to-market for the consumer goods business.
Our view
The Apollo check is being misread by the sports trade press as a vote on professional pickleball. It is something else: a vote that the combined pickleball ecosystem — courts, paddles, software, ratings, retail, media and live events — is a single platform asset, and that platform is structurally underpriced at five times revenue against consumer-platform comparables growing at materially lower rates. The next eighteen months will test whether the consolidated entity can convert participation into recurring revenue per player rather than one-off event ticketing. If it can, the $750 million headline number will look conservative by 2027.
For institutional investors, three positions follow. First, the publicly traded consumer brands with explicit pickleball exposure — Acushnet’s Vault15, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and Selkirk’s strategic backers — reprice on this print. Second, sports IP managers without an integrated platform play — standalone pro tours, single-asset leagues — will trade at a discount to integrated comparables; expect a wave of mergers. Third, watch for the next Apollo-style structured check, because consumer-platform private equity rarely makes a single bet in a category. Padel in Europe, where Qatar Sports Investments is positioning, is the obvious next target.
One number tells you why patient capital is paying attention. Pickleball reached 24 million U.S. players in five years from a base of about 3.5 million in 2019. Tennis took roughly four decades to reach its peak American participation. Apollo is not paying for the score line in next month’s MLP final. Apollo is paying for the curve.
This note reflects the views of the Solomon Grey Capital Sports & consumer desk as of publication and is for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice, a solicitation, or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Positions and views may change without notice.
